


Pressing on Clamant Bruises: A Study in Reverberation

by ThatOneGaySlytherin



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Coming Out, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Theo is Sad™️, Why am I obsessed with pairing my fav characters with OCs oops!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24082294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatOneGaySlytherin/pseuds/ThatOneGaySlytherin
Summary: I felt like a garden fountain, turned on at long last after an endless winter. It was like I was reframing the story, feeling the ebb and flow of the events on my life in a different way, not trapped in the current of “what-if.”A chance encounter throws Theo's emotional equilibrium into question, and he finally comes to terms with an old ache that he could never make subside.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky, Theodore Decker/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	Pressing on Clamant Bruises: A Study in Reverberation

**Author's Note:**

> IDK I just have a lot of feelings about The Goldfinch and this happened (mostly while I was intoxicated honestly) and I'm considering writing a follow-up too but.....IDK!!! I'm just going to post it and shut up now!

I thought I had seen the last of this piece.

That’s why it hurt all the more to be standing in the lobby of The Plaza, tapping my foot and checking my phone anxiously. I still wasn’t certain exactly whom I was waiting on aside from his name, and I hated not having enough information to build expectations. But it had to be done, so I stood, and waited, and tapped, wishing for the millionth time those days that I was still doing drugs because sometimes the edge was almost unbearable.

It was the final one. I’d sold it as a genuine Queen Anne lowboy, when in reality only the bottom center drawer and the legs had come from a Queen Anne, a beautiful cherry wood. I don’t remember where Hobie acquired the other elements of the piece, but the point is the drawer was adorned with the shell carving so indicative of the style, and the buyers were idiots. They worked in Hollywood, ex-actors, I remember: a loud, waspy woman with an absolute meathead of a husband. It had been an easy sale.

This is what took me across the country. According to my records and my memory, this was the final “changeling” I had to buy back, . It dogged me the entire process; I was never quite able to get in touch with the buyers—there was always an interception, a “could you just leave your number?”, someone answering for them and dodging the business. It was infinitely frustrating because I was only trying to put things right, and their unwillingness to to cooperate made it much harder to wrap up the ordeal. That fucking piece was like a strand of hair with a split end, just the one, lost in the mass of a luscious tangle. You know it’s there but you can never quite catch it, so it splits further and further until it cleaves the root.

Well, I had no intention of letting things get that far. So I ventured out to the West Coast on my final journey, consulting the vague records I had of the sale in order to finally find the couple and buy back the damn table. Problem is, when I arrived at the address where it had been shipped, I discovered that the couple didn’t live there anymore; instead, I was greeted by a much younger pair, both women, who had never even met the previous owners of their house, nor were they aware of any furniture that they didn’t purchase themselves.

That flight back to New York was a miserable one. I found myself unable to laugh along with this cosmic joke at my expense. When I arrived home I considered giving up altogether. Then I imagined what Hobie might say if I told him this, that I’d survived my Odyssey only to be killed by Penelope’s suitors, and I jumped right back into the fray.

It was with an inordinate amount of wheedling that I procured the piece’s latest location. Calls to realtors, internet research on the couple (Carole and Marcus Kline; not relevant enough to have any pertinent information about them online, mostly information from cult followers), spending hours combing internet forums about antiques. It was this method that led to a hit. One particularly late night, around 4 in the morning, I almost fell off my bed when I came across a picture of the table, tossed so carelessly into a post with the title: “Anybody interested in this table?”

My first instinct made me nauseous after I discarded the very idea; I immediately concocted the outline of a plan to pose as a potential buyer and use the knowledge of my own fake sale to get it back at far below the price I sold it (an absolutely absurd two hundred thousand). But there were plenty of reasons not to follow this line of thinking. First, and what should have been most important, the whole fucking point of all this running around was to do the right thing, so to cap all of that off with more deception would surely fuck my karma for life. Besides, Hobie and I were no longer tight on money after Amsterdam, and it’s possible that this double-con would somehow backfire on me anyway.

So I emailed the user who posted it, a “CKline90,” who I initially assumed was Carole herself but who seemed too versed with the use of the internet to be her after all. Through our digital conversation I learned his name was Cole, that he was their son, and that the table had never actually made it to LA. Something about that made my nerves braid themselves together. Though some of the pieces stayed in state, a few of them even in the city, something about this knowledge that the piece was right under my damn nose the entire time made me irrationally angry. Maybe it was all the work I’d done to locate it, only to find out I simply had to mosey on up to 58th to right my final wrong (at least the last one in this sordid series).

The Plaza was the kind of building that screamed old money—prewar stylings, limousines, in-house restaurants, butlers. Not far off from the life I might have lived, had things not gone so sour with Kitsey. Visits to the Barbour’s were never quite the same once we officially broke off the engagement, which was almost entirely my doing. I was hoping that my hasty departure from the party right before everything that happened in Amsterdam would turn her away completely, but she was all too ready to commit to her “head, not heart” philosophy when it came to our relationship. There was a time when this seemed practical, magnanimous on my part, even, given that she had been actively seeing another man (and Tom fucking Cable of all people, the prick), but after everything changed, so did my views on that arrangement.

“Are you Theodore?” came a voice from behind me. Because I was already feeling anxious, I nearly dropped my phone as I whipped to face him.

He was a striking man, shorter than me but taller if you were measuring confidence. He wore a bright floral shirt—the top three buttons undone—tucked casually into a pair of dark jeans, brown boots on his feet. He had a watch on his left hand that looked like it could have come from WalMart. His hair was black, borderline curly, a cloud bursting from his scalp.

“Mister Kline,” I said and extended my hand.

He shook it and laughed, a sound that filled the cavernous space with mirth. “Cole is fine, really.”

“People call me Theo,” I replied, a bit awkwardly, and checked my watch. He couldn’t have been older than 24 or 25, and everything about him seemed out of place in The Plaza. Too casual, too modern. Too friendly, even. He was loud, too, and it made me nervous due to the nature of our business.

“Well, Theo, I’m sorry I’m a bit late. Why don’t you come upstairs and make sure the table is really the one?”

Right. Even with the pictures and details I’d asked him about in our email exchanges, I requested that I see the piece too before any deal was struck. Just to be safe.

The elevator ride up was filled with Cole babbling about where he was coming from, some audition for a Broadway show, but I didn’t really latch on to the details, aside from noting that he was an actor, like his parents. I nodded and smiled along as he spoke, animated and comfortable already in a way I could be with strangers. Performative confidence was one thing, and a thing I had nearly mastered at that point through my days on the floor at Hobie’s, but his manner was so genuine and warm that it took me aback.

“This is the one here,” he said after a short walk down the hallway on the top floor. Cole rummaged through his pockets for a key, withdrew it, and shoved it into the lock, allowing me to enter the room first so he could close the door behind us.

When I say the room was gorgeous, I mean it more in an objective way. It wasn’t something I would have chosen, a bit gaudy and minimalist for my taste, but undeniably beautiful. The simplicity was one of the things that shocked me the most; everything was a shade of stark white, which accentuated the golden ornamentation. High ceilings, elegant furniture, much more modern than I expected. And as Cole guided me through the foyer and into a bedroom on the left, I spotted the table.

Sure enough, it was the one. Not that I ever had doubts, but seeing it in person just made it that much more real.

“This is it?” Cole asked as I crouched to examine it. I ran the pads of my fingers along its edges, along creases and the places where bits were attached.

“This is it,” I confirmed. As I stood to face him, Cole was collapsing onto the bed in the room with a dramatic sigh. “Long day?” I asked, not sure why I was feeling at all unsure of myself.

His head popped up from his pillow and he grinned. “Yeah. Another audition where I was ‘just not what we’re looking for.’ That’s been a common theme lately.”

I didn’t really know what to say to this—I wasn’t much familiar with the industry or its in and outs—so I decided to turn the conversation back to the fake Queen Anne.

“You know,” I said, “I’ve been hunting this down for some time.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in one of the emails. Can you explain the deal again?”

Normally it would infuriate me to have to re-explain my reason for being there, but the sunlight pouring into the room from its high windows must have put me in a high mood, because I good-naturedly explained.

“Well, a little while back I went on a sort of…streak. Of selling fake antique furniture. I had reasons for doing so, but that’s not the point. I’m here to buy it back and put things right, and also apologize for the deception. I’ve been trying to get in contact with your parents as they were the ones who bought it, but no luck on that.”

“Oh,” he said. Something in his voice made me turn away from the table again. “I guess you hadn’t heard, then. My parents…both died a couple of months ago. Car accident. Dad was a heavy drinker, and…” he trailed off.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I could taste vodka, could smell Nevada sand kicking up in my face. Emaciated arm across my chest, chlorinated water in my ears.

Cole shrugged and sat up fully in bed, looking somber. “It really fucking sucks, but I’ve been doing all right. They left me this apartment and a ridiculous amount of money, so I have a place to live and some funds to back me up while I look for work. I’d been bussing tables since I finished school and now I can finally go after something I care about. They always offered to support me, but I refused it based on principle. Stupid, maybe, but I had to hold onto some kind of principle. And then when they died…well, it felt wrong for all of it to go to waste, I guess.”

This explained a lot to me: his casual demeanor, the way he didn’t exude money the way his parents had. He seemed like just a normal twenty-something in New York City—granted, one who’d fallen into a world built on cash, but one who didn’t seem like he lived and breathed it.

“Well, I can tell you you’re about to come into another fairly large sum of cash.”

He sprung to his feet from the bed and shook his head. “Honestly, now that you’re here…Why don’t we forget the table?.”

It was like being hit in the head with a bowling ball. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t really want the money. I thought I did when I put out that ad—”

“You don’t understand,” I said, trying not to show how desperately I needed him to come off this particular diving board, “I _need_ to buy this back. It’s the last fake I sold, and if I don’t—”

“Whoah, breathe,” he said and took a step toward me. “Look at it this way. I’m fully aware now of the table’s true nature, so the responsibility is off you.”

I wasn’t quite understanding, getting frustrated because he had no idea what he was talking about. “You want to _keep_ it?”

“Why not? My parents were vapid and gullible, and it’s a physical reminder not to become them.”

He wasn’t backing down; I found myself sitting in the nearest chair I could find, my face in my hands. Breathing like I was smoking literal charcoal. “You’re serious.”

“Hey,” Cole said and crouched down in front of me. “Why don’t we grab a drink somewhere and talk about it more?”

This was the literal last thing I wanted to do, spend any more time with the man who was building a brick wall in front of my tunnel out.

“I’ll at least let you pay for that.”

I saw no choice; maybe with a couple of drinks in him he would be more willing to negotiate, to relinquish this stupid fucking desk that I’ve been seeing in dreams, sitting ablaze at the apex of a sand dune.

“All right,” I said and righted myself, pretending I hadn’t lost my cool. If he saw me as weak, he would just stay solid in his wishes. “But I don’t have all day.”

“Not a problem, I know a place a couple of blocks over.”

As it turned out, ‘a couple of blocks over’ meant a ten minute cab ride and fifteen more on foot, but I suppose everybody’s estimation of the city comes with a certain amount of variation. Cole made attempts at small talk throughout this journey, and every time he spoke I dug my fingernails deeper into my palms. Most of the time he was talking about bars and restaurants we passed, stories from the glory days of college (he’d gone to Pace University for musical theater and had done a great deal of romping around the city along the way), asking if I’d tried this little place on the corner or ever seen the downstairs of such-and-such restaurant.

One block down from our destination, we ran into a friend of Cole’s, who insisted on stopping us to talk. He was a friend from work, apparently, an annoyingly chiseled man with dark skin, bleached-blond hair and perfect teeth.

“Brandon, this is Theo Decker,” Cole said, and I had no choice but to paste on a fake but convincing smile (something with which I was more than familiar) and shake his hand.

“Very off brand,” Brandon said to Cole; an inside joke I was somehow the butt of.

Cole laughed. “No, he’s just a friend.”

Brandon didn’t seem to buy into this, but he still wrapped up the conversation and was on his way.

“What was that all about?” I asked once I was sure he was out of earshot—the street was oddly vacant for a temperate afternoon.

“Oh, my friends always joke about the rotation of men in my life. I have a type and you don’t really fit into it, that’s all Brandon meant.”

This stunned me; I almost forgot that we had somewhere to be and I was following Cole there. I had to jog to catch up to him again after breaking myself from my stupor with some assistance from a particularly loud car horn at the end of the block.

“He thought we were _together_?”

Cole shrugged. “I guess so. Oh, here’s the place!”

Before I could ask any more questions Cole was guiding me into a cramped little bar where all the decor was themed after video games and space travel. Two pinball machines whirred from the back. I didn’t even get to look at what it was called before he swept us both up to the bar and ordered two bourbons.

“Hope that’s okay, you seem like you need it.”

I was still taken aback from our encounter with his friend so I just nodded, embarrassed that I’d gone practically catatonic. Cole chose a booth for us in the back corner; the seats were rather damaged and not very comfortable, and there was a weird sticky layer on the table between us. The strangest part was he seemed so at home there, taking a large sip of his drink and clacking the glass down.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked him, turning the glass in my hands.

Cole shrugged and took another gulp. “You struck me as a video game kind of guy, I guess. It’s—”

“The glasses?”

“Partly. Only someone into all of this would also be nerdy enough to work with antique furniture.”

I must have pulled a sour face at this, because he learned forward, his expression apologetic. “I don’t at all mean that as a bad thing! I think it’s admirable that you care so much. But damn, you could do with some loosening up, too.”

He didn’t need to know my history of loosening up, of the slurry of nights I can’t remember, illicit exchanges of cash for pills.

“I also usually bring guys here on first dates,” Cole said, almost too casually, as he knocked back the last of his bourbon.

I was finally taking my first sip at this point and almost inhaled it.

“Not that this has to be a date, unless you want it to be.”

“You have the wrong idea. I’m not gay.”

At this, Cole sat back and frowned—it was his turn to be thrown off. “Wait, really? Holy shit. This is the first time in a _long time_ that I’ve been wrong.”

My face was burning and I was overcome with the desire to stand and walk briskly away from the conversation, ready to forget the table altogether and pretend that day never happened.

“What the hell gave you that impression?”

He looked scared when I said this and I didn’t understand why in the moment; I was too wrapped up in the misunderstanding, the assumption. I desperately wanted a cigarette but had none on me, opting instead to down what was left of my drink.

“I’m sorry,” he began, and the veiled fear in his voice calmed me and concerned me in equal measure. “It was a little bit of everything, I guess. Your manner, your profession, what you’re wearing…”

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” My clothes were what I often wore for these business meetings, though most of them didn’t land me in themed bars—dark, pressed pants, dress shoes (nothing flashy), and a green, cable-knit sweater. It was a warm day, but I think part of me was still trapped in Vegas, melted into the sand from hours of burning sun and condensing, sticking there, from the cool nights

“There’s nothing _wrong_ with it.” He was very clearly exasperated and his body language had changed—now protective and turned inward. “I thought wrong, okay? We should just go back to the topic at hand.”

Maybe we should have, but there was something in me, some kind of deep, pulsing ache, that wanted to press the subject further. I said, “I didn’t meant to offend you,” because I hadn’t, then, “let me buy you another drink.” At this I gave him no option to say no, just approached the bar and ordered another round for us. I figured he could do with some time—even just a few seconds—away from the situation I’d just created.

“I’m not gonna lie, you scared me a little,” he said when I returned with the drinks.

This was perplexing, as was the fact that my heart rate was up, that I was sweating as much as I was. “How?” I felt like I was on a tightrope, once I’d always tiptoed across precariously, and for the first time I was risking a look at what was below me.

“You don’t know what it’s like to base most of your dating life on vibes. Some guys are outright cruel if you suggest that there’s something ‘gay’ about them. I’ve seen friends wake up the morning after a night out with a black eye or a tooth missing.”

“Oh,” was all I could think to say, because I’d never seen myself as a violent person and would never have acted on my discomfort, though how was he to know that? “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he said and came into himself more fully again. The conversation turned back to the story of his first time in that bar, but my mind was wandering. Why _had_ I reacted the way I did? Defensive, even angry depending on interpretation. Homosexuality wasn’t necessarily a novel concept to me; I’d been hit on by men before in passing, was exposed to so many brands of love by the mere fact of living in the city, but I rarely imagined myself straying from women. That is to say, I had imagined it on rare occasion, typically in the aftermath of nightmares when all I wanted was a strong arm across my shoulders and a husky voice in my ear telling me that everything was fine.

“I’m really struggling to get a read on you, you know,” Cole said to me in the middle of whatever tale he was recounting.

“How so?”

He squinted his eyes a bit and held some bourbon in his mouth before swallowing. “I don’t know. You just seem so…serious. And cryptic. It wouldn’t shock me if you have some kind of dark past,” he joked, but he had no idea. Even at that time I wasn’t much game for talking about it, especially not with relative strangers, but something about him made me want to wrench rusty nails out of boarded up windows and let some sunlight through.

“My parents are also dead,” is how I started, just to test the waters.

He merely nodded and took a sip of his drink, drummed on the table with slender fingers. “Shit.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at this. “Shit is right. My dad was a big gambler—I stayed in Vegas with him and his girlfriend for a little while—and he landed himself in a huge hole of debt. Ended up getting plastered so he could work up the courage to jump in his car and drive until he hit something, he was scared shitless and had no way of paying up.” I still felt his hand against my face sometimes, whenever voices were raised and tensions high. “He hit some _one_ , actually. The others involved ended up fine, though not without injuries, but he died on impact.” I didn’t take my eyes off Cole’s face, looking for any sign that this was too much, too close to home, but it never came and I continued. This was the hard part. “And my mother…was killed in a terrorist bombing at the Met when I was thirteen.”

“Holy shit. I remember hearing about that bombing. I must have been nine or ten.”

“The story had serious traction for a long time. There was some art that went missing,” I started, but immediately choked down my words. I hadn’t spoken about the painting since it was safely returned, but it still made frequent occurrences in sleep, either dazzling under a layer of golden light or covered in ash and rubble. Both images caused me to sit up in bed, panting, sometimes crying. “Anyway, that’s how I ended up with my dad, and then when he died I came back here and started working for Hobie—my business partner, that is. He’s the one who made the desk.”

“Oh. Right, the desk,” he said, like he’d forgotten it completely.

“I was training under him, though I work more on the floor, showing and selling.” I sighed and swallowed down a sizable portion of the second drink, decided there wasn’t enough to stop, and threw the rest back after it. “Like I said, there were multiple fakes like this that were sold, mostly so I could start paying off all the debt Hobie had incurred in the years after his previous partner died—also in that museum bombing. That’s how I found Hobie in the first place.”

Cole sat forward. “You’re kidding. And you live with him now?”

“Right. He’s the only father I’ve ever really had, all told. He took me in after everything happened—well, I actually lived with the family of a school friend’s after the accident and before Vegas, but he also passed away not too long ago—”

“Whoah, slow down. This is so much.”

He was right; something in me was knocked out of place and it was all just gushing out, like when I had sat down all those times and written everything out in those stupid notebooks, hoping that somebody might someday validate my angst, the darkness I’d claimed. But here I was instead spelling it out to a man I’d met an hour before.

The strangest part—and I didn’t realize this until much later, broke out into a cold sweat—I didn’t think about Pippa once when I was with him, as I continued to tell him about the Barbours, about Dad and Xandra, about the piece that got me in trouble in the first place, Andy’s death and reuniting with Mrs. Barbour. I left off everything with Kitsey, wouldn’t dare go near the topic of Amsterdam. But still, I felt like a garden fountain, turned on at long last after an endless winter. It was like I was reframing the story, feeling the ebb and flow of the events on my life in a different way, not trapped in the current of “what-if.” And though he was a gregarious man, one who’d dominated most of the conversation prior to that moment, Cole sat and listened, nodding along, reacting just the ways I hoped he would, bearing witness to my entire life in a way I didn’t think possible.

How I ended up sleeping with him that night still makes me pause, makes me wonder. What if he’d never unlocked the thing inside of me that I’d wrapped and wrapped with chains, ever since a desperate kiss in the middle of the night, since even before then? My reaction to his initial assumption was automatic, like a dog trained to sit when a treat is presented, only I’d been the one who’d conditioned myself. Because I’d thought about it more than I cared to admit, more than I thought was healthy, and I only dug myself deeper and deeper into the pit of denial that opened up in response.

As I lay next to him, chests still heaving, it was another moment of utter separation, of a Before and an After, and it still hurt and was so complicated and I retreated into myself without realizing. I realized that I conflated things in my childhood, a painting and a girl and a mother and they were all distinct, had to be pried apart in my head, and the feelings had to be sorted, separated into distinct piles—and God, there were enough feelings that they were _piles_ —and it made me wish I had taken the plunge sooner instead of blocking it all out, numbing my head with my body.

“Are you okay?” Cole eventually asked, and I started because I’d forgotten where I was but his body was still pressed against mine, warm and solid and breathing in tandem.

“I was engaged, you know,” I told him.

“To a woman.”

“Right.”

“What happened?”

“She cheated on me.”

“Oh. So you broke it off.”

“No, not right away.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” I suddenly didn’t want to get into it, regretted bringing it up. It was so far behind me emotionally that rehashing would only be bad for both of us.

“You’re going to call him, aren’t you?” was the next question, almost ten silent minutes later.

I turned at this to face him, stared at the his eyes, soft and understanding in the darkness. It was unspoken between us, that we probably wouldn’t see each other again, and I was somewhat grateful for that.

“Your friend, I mean. The one you met in Vegas.”

“I’m not following.”

“It was clear when you started talking about him that there’s…there’s _something_ there. Even before you came around and kissed me, I could see it on your face. You love him, don’t you?”

I was embarrassed that my eyes were suddenly wet and wished I hadn’t turned to face him. It was too intimate, too close, the sort of proximity that had always been reserved for one person.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “Maybe I’ll call him. I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to. I just thought, well, maybe now that you’ve…sorted some things out, it could be something worth pursuing.”

“Maybe,” I murmured, my gaze fixated on the window in the apartment, pointedly ignoring the very table that brought me to Cole in the first place. It’s hard to describe what was happening internally as I curled up in bed with a man for the first time in my life—the first time that his being a man was something conscious, notable, that is. Boris and I had shared a bed countless nights, but it was never about us both being boys; there was a brief period I thought about it that way, and then Kotku came into the picture and I didn’t feel so insecure anymore. Always assumed it was strictly symbiotic. Seeing it from a different, re-contextualized lens was more than overwhelming: it was breathtaking. Shattering.

I haven’t seen Cole since that night, though we exchange a stray email now and then. He still doesn’t know the full extent of what he did for me, turning me inside out and putting me on a path with different colors, ones I didn’t know existed. I was still drunk so the memories are hazy, but I recall him holding me while I cried, younger than I was but somehow wiser, already familiar with the kind of ache that radiated through my body.

When I returned to Hobie’s in the early hours of morning, I felt clear and raw. Changed. I looked in the mirror in the bathroom and didn’t see any difference, but everything _felt_ like it shifted that night.

I stumbled into my own room—more out of exhaustion than intoxication at that point—and remembered an article of clothing that was folded unskillfully and shoved to the back of my closet. Frantically, I dug for it and procured the shirt, a simple white dress shirt that Boris had loaned me in Amsterdam. I wore it once and never gave it back, never washed it. He’d pulled it off his literal back, revealing his body, angular and pale—he’d made some comment about staring, then threw the shirt at me and put on another.

Kneeling on the ground I pressed the shirt to my face; it still smelled like him, and it smelled like me, and the scents were almost indistinguishable, like two nihilistic, fucked-up teenagers curled together, spindly limbs tangled, a small dog breathing raggedly along with them.

As the dark blue of pre-dawn pressed in through the window, I sobbed into the shirt, knowing I should give it back but realizing I never could.


End file.
